Optimizing Sales Opportunities: The GPS of Selling

Remember maps? You could buy them at gas stations and unfold them and search out where you were and where you wanted to go. You could plot routes and make a plan and then try to refold it only to end up with some misshapen accordion of paper. It was all very manual and didn’t adapt well to change. And if you missed a turn, you had to try to figure out where you were now and come up with a new route.

Technology changed all of that – it brought us the GPS. Now your trip is mapped for you with two simple pieces of information: Where are you? Where do you want to be? And it already knows where you are.

GPS keeps on knowing where you are at any given point in your trip and graphically displays it for you. It provides turn-by-turn directions so you always know what to do to keep going in the right direction.

If you miss a turn or take a little detour, GPS automatically provides new guidance because it still knows where you are and want to go. It will tell you all the relevant statistics about your trip, and for those trips requiring special attention, like warning truck drivers of height restrictions, there are special features. GPS does this all constantly, automatically, without any input from you.

It seems like it should be complex, even overwhelming to use, but it’s not. Two pieces of information and look what you get. Behind those pieces of information there is massive and reliable technology at work to make it all seem simple and trustworthy when it is in fact incredibly complex. Satellites, uplinks and downlinks, algorithms, computer models, and more.

Let’s look at the analogy. Two pieces of information? In sales, those are the two fundamental questions surrounding any sales cycle: Will the customer actually buy something? And if they do, will they buy it from us? The first question considers all of the buyer’s side of the equation – budget, need, authority, etc. The second considers the seller’s – competition, price, product, etc. And the answers are easy – high, medium, or low.

Take a look:

If your sales cycle changes, which they always do, ASPEC compensates, adjusting the model and providing new suggestions on how to get to the win.

Special situations? For those, ASPEC Expert asks some multiple choice questions and the computer analyzes these and compares them to your sales cycle model, and out pops a summary of your specific situation and some suggestions on how to improve it.

Trip statistics? Because ASPEC actually models every sales cycle and monitors all the activity, you have a wealth of statistics available to constantly measure and improve how you sell.

Just as there is incredible technology operating behind your GPS, so too with ASPEC. Four methodology patents and the power of modern cybernetics result in Computational Selling, the technology where the computer learns the ideal sales process and applies it to your sales cycle to assure you are always aware of the sales environment and applying the appropriate selling skills to the situation.

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